JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS: NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD - CHAPTER VIII. FOREST NOTES

(1875-6)

ON THE PLAIN

Perhaps the reader knows already the
aspect of the great levels of the GÃ¢tinais where
they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau.
Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest
as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few
apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The quaint
undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out
into the distance; the strips blend and disappear;
and the dead flat lies forth open and empty with
no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint
church-spire against the sky. Solemn and vast
at all times in spite of pettiness in the near details
the impression becomes more solemn and vast towards
evening. The sun goes down a swollen orange
as it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant
rides home with a harrow smoking behind him among
the dry clods. Another still works with his wife
in their little strip. An immense shadow fills
the plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders;
and their heads as they stoop over their work and
rise again are relieved from time to time against
the golden sky.

These peasant farmers are well off
nowadays and not by any means overworked; but somehow
you always see in them the historical representative
of the serf of yore and think not so much of present
times which may be prosperous enough as of the old
days when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility
of payment and lived in Michelet’s image
like a hare between two furrows. These very people
now weeding their patch under the broad sunset that
very man and his wife it seems to us have suffered
all the wrongs of France. It is they who have
been their country’s scape-goat for long ages;
they who generation after generation have sowed
and not reaped reaped and another has garnered; and
who have now entered into their reward and enjoy their
good things in their turn. For the days are gone
by when the Seigneur ruled and profited. “Le
Seigneur” says the old formula “enfermesesmanantscommesousporteetgonds duciel Ã laterre.
Toutest Ã lui forÃªt chenue
oiseaudans l’air poissondans
l’eau bÃªteaubuisson l’ondéquicoule laclochedontlésonauloinroule.”
Such was his old state of sovereignty a local god
rather than a mere king. And now you may ask
yourself where he is and look round for vestiges of
my late lord and in all the country-side there is
no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion.
At the end of a long avenue now sown with grain
in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs
ducks and crowing chanticleers and droning bees the
old chÃ¢teau lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs
and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There
is a glad spring bustle in the air perhaps and the
lilacs are all in flower and the creepers green about
the broken balustrade; but no spring shall revive
the honour of the place. Old women of the people
little children of the people saunter and gambol in
the walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected
moat. Plough-horses mighty of limb browse in
the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits
for some better hour. Out on the plain where
hot sweat trickles into men’s eyes and the
spade goes in deep and comes up slowly perhaps the
peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart when
he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold
which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay
folk at supper while he and his hollow-eyed children
watched through the night with empty bellies and cold
feet. And perhaps as he raises his head and
sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills
along the sea-like level of the plain perhaps forest
and chÃ¢teau hold no unsimilar place in his affections.

If the chÃ¢teau was my lord’s
the forest was my lord the king’s; neither of
them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke
out his meagre way of life by some petty theft of
wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he found
himself face to face with a whole department, from
the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a
high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was
a peasant like himself, and wore stripes or bandolier
by way of uniform. For the first offence, by the
Salic law, there was a fine of fifteen sols;
and should a man be taken more than once in fault,
or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt,
he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There
was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine
tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might
see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.

And then, if he lived near to a cover,
there would be the more hares and rabbits to eat out
his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down.
My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid
out seven francs in decorating it with silver and
gold, and fitting it with a silken leash to hang about
his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage
to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in
the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has
made a speciality of the health of hunting-dogs.
In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch
broken by our best piqueur. A rare day’s
hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly flourish,
sound the bien-aller with all your lungs.
Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, while the quarry
and hound and huntsman sweep across his field, and
a year’s sparing and labouring is as though it
had not been. If he can see the ruin with a good
enough grace, who knows but he may fall in favour
with my lord; who knows but his son may become the
last and least among the servants at his lordship’s
kennel ­one of the two poor varlets
who get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds?

For all that, the forest has been
of use to Jacques, not only warming him with fallen
wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the chÃ¢teau, with all his troopers
and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field
into some ultimate fastness, or lay overseas in an
English prison. In these dark days, when the watch
on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages
on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering
pennon drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
gat them up, with all their household gods, into the
wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts
might overlook the coming and going of the marauders,
and see the harvest ridden down, and church and cottage
go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where
they must abide all change of weather and keep house
with wolves and vipers. Often there was none
left alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions
of field from field. And yet, as times went,
when the wolves entered at night into depopulated
Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company
of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets
there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.

Once or twice, as I say, in the course
of the ages, the forest may have served the peasant
well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble
by old association. These woods have rung to
the horns of all the kings of France, from Philip
Augustus downwards. They have seen St. Louis
exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis
I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train;
and Peter of Russia following his first stag.
And so they are still haunted for the imagination
by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the
faces of memorable men of yore. And this distinction
is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs.
Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the
affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken
shape in some significant and dramatic situation.
It was hence that Guise and his leaguers led Charles
the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted and
spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon
met the Pope beside a woodland cross. Here, on
his way to Elba, not so long after, he kissed the
eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate
farewell to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo,
rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one
of his faithful regiments burned that memorial of
so much toil and glory on the Grand Master’s
table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest
consumes the remnants of the Host.

IN THE SEASON

Close into the edge of the forest
so close that the trees of the bornage stand
pleasantly about the last houses sits a certain small
and very quiet village. There is but one street
and that not long ago was a green lane where the
cattle browsed between the doorsteps. As you
go up this street drawing ever nearer the beginning
of the wood you will arrive at last before an inn
where artists lodge. To the door (for I imagine
it to be six o’clock on some fine summer’s
even) half a dozen or maybe half a score of people
have brought out chairs and now sit sunning themselves
and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go
on into the court you will find as many more some
in the billiard-room over absinthe and a match of
corks some without over a last cigar and a vermouth.
The doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense
is drawing water from the well; and as all the rooms
open into the court you can see the white-capped
cook over the furnace in the kitchen and some idle
painter who has stored his canvases and washed his
brushes jangling a waltz on the crazy tongue-tied
piano in the salle-Ã -manger. “Edmond
encore un vermouth” cries a man in velveteen
adding in a tone of apologetic after-thought “un
double s’il vous plaÃ®t.” “Where
are you working?” asks one in pure white linen
from top to toe. “At the Garrefour de l’Ãpine”
returns the other in corduroy (they are all gaitered
by the way). “I couldn’t do a thing
to it. I ran out of white. Where were you?”
“I wasn’t working. I was looking for
motives.” Here is an outbreak of jubilation
and a lot of men clustering together about some new-comer
with outstretched hands; perhaps the “correspondence”
has come in and brought So-and-so from Paris or perhaps
it is only So-and-so who has walked over from Chailly
to dinner.

“Ã table Messieurs!”
cries M. Siron bearing through the court the first
tureen of soup. And immediately the company begins
to settle down about the long tables in the dining-room
framed all round with sketches of all degrees of merit
and demerit. There’s the big picture of
the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between
his legs and his legs ­well his legs in
stockings. And here is the little picture of a
raw mutton-chop in which Such-a-one knocked a hole
last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from
the dessert. And under all these works of art
so much eating goes forward so much drinking so much
jabbering in French and English that it would do
your heart good merely to peep and listen at the door.
One man is telling how they all went last year to
the fÃªte at Fleury and another how well So-and-so
would sing of an evening; and here are a third and
fourth making plans for the whole future of their
lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjuror making
faces on his clenched fist surely of all arts the
most difficult and admirable! A sixth has eaten
his fill lights a cigarette and resigns himself
to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in and
calls for soup. Number eight meanwhile has
left the table and is once more trampling the poor
piano under powerful and uncertain fingers.

Dinner over, people drop outside to
smoke and chat. Perhaps we go along to visit
our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and
perhaps some pickled oysters and white wine to close
the evening. Or a dance is organised in the dining-room,
and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful
jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and
a lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro
upon the wooden floor, and sober men, who are not
given to such light pleasures, get up on the table
or the sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly
over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes ­suppose
my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the
half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by
day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and
makes a clear shadow under every vine leaf on the
wall ­sometimes a picnic is proposed, and
a basket made ready, and a good procession formed
in front of the hotel. The two trumpeters in
honour go before; and as we file down the long alley,
and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees,
with every here and there a dark passage of shadow,
and every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit
woods, these two precede us and sound many a jolly
flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry
boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters
the shadows of the old bandits’ haunt, and shows
shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes
ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the
punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls.
So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.
And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling
a good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders,
but ever called together again, as one of our leaders
winds his horn. Perhaps some one of the party
will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way
of his own. As he follows the winding sandy road,
he hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in
the distance, and die finally out, and still walks
on in the strange coolness and silence and between
the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away
Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.
No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing
knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a
more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations
in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has
grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to
him he might hear the church-bells ring the hour out
all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris,
and away in outlandish cities, and in the village
on the river, where his childhood passed between the
sun and flowers.

IDLE HOURS

The woods by night in all their uncanny
effect are not rightly to be understood until you
can compare them with the woods by day. The stillness
of the medium the floor of glittering sand these
trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds
and waver in the moving winds like the weeds in submarine
currents all these set the mind working on the thought
of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the
side of a boat and make you feel like a diver down
in the quiet water fathoms below the tumbling transitory
surface of the sea. And yet in itself as I say
the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not
to be felt fully without the sense of contrast.
You must have risen in the morning and seen the woods
as they are by day kindled and coloured in the sun’s
light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable
trees at even the unsparing heat along the forest
roads and the coolness of the groves.

And on the first morning you will
doubtless rise betimes. If you have not been
wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon
you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
window ­for there are no blinds or shutters
to keep him out ­and the room with its bare
wood floor and bare whitewashed walls shines all
round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights.
You may doze a while longer by snatches or lie awake
to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with
which former occupants have defiled the partitions:
Thiers with wily profile; local celebrities pipe
in hand; or maybe a romantic landscape splashed
in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into
the salle-Ã -manger for coffee and then shoulders
easel sunshade stool and paint-box bound into
a fagot and sets off for what he calls his “motive.”
And artist after artist as he goes out of the village
carries with him a little following of dogs. For
the dogs who belong only nominally to any special
master hang about the gate of the forest all day
long and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy
profit by his escort and go forth with him to play
an hour or two at hunting. They would like to
be under the trees all day. But they cannot go
alone. They require a pretext. And so they
take the passing artist as an excuse to go into the
woods as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse
to bathe. With quick ears long spines and bandy
legs or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with a
bulldog’s head this company of mongrels will
trot by your side all day and come home with you at
night still showing white teeth and wagging stunted
tail. Their good humour is not to be exhausted.
You may pelt them with stones if you please all they
will do is to give you a wider berth. If once
they come out with you to you they will remain faithful
and with you return; although if you meet them next
morning in the street it is as like as not they will
cut you with a countenance of brass.

The forest ­a strange thing
for an Englishman ­is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of
wood among the meadows gives up an incense of song,
and every valley wandered through by a streamlet rings
and reverberates from side to side with a profusion
of clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not
to be regretted on its own account only. For
the insects prosper in their absence, and become as
one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the
hot sand; mosquitoes drone their nasal drone; wherever
the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you
see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going
in the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even
where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark
arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual
drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal
living things between the trees. Nor are insects
the only evil creatures that haunt the forest.
For you may plump into a cave among the rocks, and
find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see
a crooked viper slither across the road.

Perhaps you may set yourself down
in the bay between two spreading beech-roots with
a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden
by a friend: “I say, just keep where you
are, will you? You make the jolliest motive.”
And you reply: “Well, I don’t mind,
if I may smoke.” And thereafter the hours
go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours
doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the
tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the
shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the
fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing
out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to
stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun
that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind
goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither
and thither like butterflies of light. But you
know it is going forward; and, out of emulation with
the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out
the colour for a woodland scene in words.

Your tree stands in a hollow paved
with fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills,
and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All
the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything
stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every
colour is strained into its highest key. The
boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic
castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle.
The junipers ­looking, in their soiled and
ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that
has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred
years and more in wind and rain ­are daubed
in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with
pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry figure
they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees!
The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar,
and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight,
as a man might live fifty years in England and not
see.

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes
up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous
air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how
white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and
how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked
for the passionless land. Yet a little while,
sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only
to sit and remember loves that might have been.
There is a falling flourish in the air that remains
in the memory and comes back in incongruous places,
on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night,
with something of a forest savour.

“You can get up now,”
says the painter; “I’m at the background.”

And so up you get, stretching yourself,
and go your way into the wood, the daylight becoming
richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
farther into the open. A cool air comes along
the highways, and the scents awaken. The fir-trees
breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown thickets
comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the
woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as
though court ladies, who had known these paths in
ages long gone by, still walked in the summer evenings,
and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot
upon the woodland winds. One side of the long
avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other is
plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees
the west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters
gather up their chattels, and go down, by avenue or
footpath, to the plain.

A PLEASURE-PARTY

As this excursion is a matter of some
length and moreover we go in force we have set
aside our usual vehicle the pony-cart and ordered
a large wagonette from Lejosne’s. It has
been waiting for near an hour while one went to pack
a knapsack and t’other hurried over his toilette
and coffee; but now it is filled from end to end with
merry folk in summer attire the coachman cracks his
whip and amid much applause from round the inn-door
off we rattle at a spanking trot. The way lies
through the forest up hill and down dale and by beech
and pine wood in the cheerful morning sunshine.
The English get down at all the ascents and walk on
ahead for exercise; the French are mightily entertained
at this and keep coyly underneath the tilt. As
we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter
and light speech and some one will be always breaking
out into a bar or two of opera bouffe. Before
we get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez the colourman
from Fontainebleau trudging across on his weekly
peddle with a case of merchandise; and it is “Desprez
leave me some malachite green”; “Desprez
leave me so much canvas”; “Desprez leave
me this or leave me that”; M. Desprez standing
the while in the sunlight with grave face and many
salutations. The next interruption is more important.
For some time back we have had the sound of cannon
in our ears; and now a little past Franchard we
find a mounted trooper holding a led horse who brings
the wagonette to a stand. The artillery is practising
in the Quadrilateral it appears; passage along the
Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment.
There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring
cross-roads and get down to make fun with the notorious
Cocardon the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all
the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon or clamber
about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the Doctor
with sun umbrella wide Panama and patriarchal beard
is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know)
bribing the too facile sentry. His speech is
smooth and dulcet his manner dignified and insinuating.
It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged all
the world over and speaks all languages from French
to Patagonian. He has not come home from perilous
journeys to be thwarted by a corporal of horse.
And so we soon see the soldier’s mouth relax
and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart. “En
voiture Messieurs Mesdames” sings the
Doctor; and on we go again at a good round pace for
black care follows hard after us and discretion prevails
not a little over valour in some timorous spirits
of the party. At any moment we may meet the sergeant
who will send us back. At any moment we may encounter
a flying shell which will send us somewhere farther
off than Grez.

Grez ­for that is our destination ­has
been highly recommended for its beauty. “Il
y a de l’eau” people have said with
an emphasis as if that settled the question which
for a French mind I am rather led to think it does.
And Grez when we get there is indeed a place worthy
of some praise. It lies out of the forest a
cluster of houses with an old bridge an old castle
in ruin and a quaint old church. The inn garden
descends in terraces to the river; stableyard kailyard
orchard and a space of lawn fringed with rushes
and embellished with a green arbour. On the opposite
bank there is a reach of English-looking plain set
thickly with willows and poplars. And between
the two lies the river clear and deep and full of
reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster
about the starlings of the long low bridge and stand
half-way up upon the piers in green luxuriance.
They catch the dipped oar with long antennÃ¦ and
chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their
leaves. And the river wanders hither and thither
among the islets and is smothered and broken up by
the reeds like an old building in the lithe hardy
arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box
where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for
his kitchen one oily ripple following another over
the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a
splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed under
the old kirk where the village women wash and wash
all day among the fish and water-lilies. It seems
as if linen washed there should be specially cool
and sweet.

We have come here for the river.
And no sooner have we all bathed than we board the
two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding under
the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies.
Some one sings; some trail their hands in the cool
water; some lean over the gunwale to see the image
of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow of the
boat, with balanced oars and their own head protruded,
glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream.
At last, the day declining ­all silent and
happy, and up to the knees in the wet lilies ­we
punt slowly back again to the landing-place beside
the bridge. There is a wish for solitude on all.
One hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another
goes a walk in the country with Cocardon; a third
inspects the church. And it is not till dinner
is on the table, and the inn’s best wine goes
round from glass to glass, that we begin to throw
off the restraint and fuse once more into a jolly
fellowship.

Half the party are to return to-night
with the wagonette; and some of the others, loath
to break up good company, will go with them a bit of
the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It
is dark in the wagonette, and not so merry as it might
have been. The coachman loses the road.
So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent
success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary
to applaud; and it seems as if the festival were fairly
at an end ­

“Nousavons fait lanoce,
Rentrons Ã nosfoyers!”

And such is the burthen, even after
we have come to Marlotte and taken our places in the
court at Mother Antonine’s. There is punch
on the long table out in the open air, where the guests
dine in summer weather. The candles flare in
the night wind, and the faces round the punch are lit
up, with shifting emphasis, against a background of
complete and solid darkness. It is all picturesque
enough; but the fact is, we are aweary. We yawn;
we are out of the vein; we have made the wedding, as
the song says, and now, for pleasure’s sake,
let’s make an end on’t. When here
comes striding into the court, booted to mid-thigh,
spurred and splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the
great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and in a moment
the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of
our laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen,
picture-dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and
thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain of mind
and voice, that would rather suggest a nervous crisis
than a desire to please. We are as merry as ever
when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily
to all the good folk going farther. Then, as
we are far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit
Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in
a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered
with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow
and shine, by a wood-fire in a mediÃ¦val chimney.
And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn
beside the river.

How quick bright things come to confusion!
When we arise next morning, the grey showers fall
steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of the
stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday’s
lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally
enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt
sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the dripping
house roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the
green and golden landscape of last night, as though
an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and
blotted it together with a sponge. We go out
a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about
Grez have a trick of their own. They go on for
a while among clumps of willows and patches of vine,
and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease and
determine in some miry hollow or upon some bald knowe;
and you have a short period of hope, then right-about
face, and back the way you came! So we draw about
the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for
ha’pence, or go to the billiard-room for a match
at corks; and by one consent a messenger is sent over
for the wagonette ­Grez shall be left to-morrow.

THE WOODS IN SPRING

I think you will like the forest best
in the sharp early spring-time when it is just beginning
to re-awaken and innumerable violets peep from among
the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most
sit down to dinner and at table you will do well
to keep a rug about your knees for the nights are
chill and the salle-Ã -manger opens on the court.
There is less to distract the attention for one thing
and the forest is more itself. It is not bedotted
with artists’ sunshades as with unknown mushrooms
nor bestrewn with the remains of English picnics.
The hunting still goes on and at any moment your heart
may be brought into your mouth as you hear far-away
horns; or you may be told by an agitated peasant that
the Vicomte has gone up the avenue not ten minutes
since “Ã fond de train monsieur et avec
douze piqueurs.”

If you go up to some coign of vantage
in the system of low hills that permeates the forest
you will see many different tracts of country each
of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint and all
mixed together and mingled the one into the other
at the seams. You will see tracts of leafless
beeches of a faint yellowish grey and leafless oaks
a little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine
of a solemn green; and dotted among the pines or
standing by themselves in rocky clearings the delicate
snow-white trunks of birches spreading out into snow-white
branches yet more delicate and crowned and canopied
with a purple haze of twigs. And then a long
bare ridge of tumbled boulders with bright sandbreaks
between them and wavering sandy roads among the bracken
and brown heather. It is all rather cold and
unhomely. It has not the perfect beauty nor
the gem-like colouring of the wood in the later year
when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow tremulous with insects intersected here and
there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heather.
The loveliness of the woods in March is not assuredly
of this blowsy rustic type. It is made sharp with
a grain of salt with a touch of ugliness. It
has a sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire
the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives.
And the wonderful clear pure air wells into your
lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations and
makes the eyes bright and sets the heart tinkling
to a new tune ­or rather to an old tune;
for you remember in your boyhood something akin to
this spirit of adventure this thirst for exploration
that now takes you masterfully by the hand plunges
you into many a deep grove and drags you over many
a stony crest. It is as if the whole wood were
full of friendly voices calling you farther in and
you turn from one side to another like Buridan’s
donkey in a maze of pleasure.

Comely beeches send up their white,
straight, clustered branches, barred with green moss,
like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand.
Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery
of underwood; thence the tall shaft climbs upward,
and the great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out
into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying
and calling. On the sward of the Bois d’Hyver
the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like
fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around,
and the sound of the axe is rarely still. But
strangest of all, and in appearance oldest of all,
are the dim and wizard upland districts of young wood.
The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn
with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks
lie crouching in the thicket, guttered with rain,
tufted with lichen, white with years and the rigours
of the changeful seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies
are sown and carried away again by the light air ­like
thistledown. The loneliness of these coverts
is so excessive, that there are moments when pleasure
draws to the verge of fear. You listen and listen
for some noise to break the silence, till you grow
half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your
sense of your own identity is troubled; your brain
reels, like that of some gymnosophist poring on his
own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should you see your
own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything
of yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.

Still the forest is always, but the
stillness is not always unbroken. You can hear
the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes
briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with
a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves.
And sometimes, close at hand, the branches move, a
moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills
to its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage
on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual
chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may
time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of
the woodman’s axe. From time to time, over
the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by; and from
time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the
ear, not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England,
but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and far away,
as fits these solemn places. Or you hear suddenly
the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared
deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood;
then a man or two running, in green blouse, with gun
and game-bag on a bandolier; and then, out of the
thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots.
Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are blown,
and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings,
and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below
you, where you sit perched among the rocks and heather.
The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, and in
all neighbouring villages, there is a vague excitement
and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a singlepiqueur,
or spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man of
consequence for the night.

Besides men who shoot and men who
ride with the hounds, there are few people in the
forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying
their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
wood for the fire. You may meet such a party
coming home in the twilight: the old woman laden
with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling
a long branch behind them in her wake. That is
the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I
tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes;
for the adventure was unique. It was on a very
cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky
and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who
shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle
played with much hesitation, and saw the smoke of
a fire spread out along the green pine-tops, in a
remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders.
He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
under a tree in an open. The old father knitted
a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire. The
eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons,
was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. Two or
three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets.
And the whole party as grave and silent as the woods
around them! My friend watched for a long time,
he says; but all held their peace; not one spoke or
smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at
his work and made strange movements the while with
his flexible eyebrows. They took no notice whatever
of my friend’s presence, which was disquieting
in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical wax-works. Certainly, he affirms,
a wax figure might have played the bugle with more
spirit than that strange dragoon. And as this
hypothesis of his became more certain, the awful insolubility
of why they should be left out there in the woods
with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down,
and a growing disquietude as to what might happen
next, became too much for his courage, and he turned
tail, and fairly took to his heels. It might
have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he
was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.
Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery;
it may be they were automata; or it may be (and this
is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is
all another chapter of Heine’s “Gods in
Exile”; that the upright old man with the eyebrows
was no other than Father Jove, and the young dragoon
with the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.

Your ideal is not perhaps high, but
it is plain and possible. You become enamoured
of a life of change and movement and the open air,
where the muscles shall be more exercised than the
affections. When you have had your will of the
forest, you may visit the whole round world. You
may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot.
You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with
a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted East.
You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany widespread
before you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled
and spired, that dream all day on their own reflections
in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal
cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to
where Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her
marble palaces in the midland sea. You may sleep
in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may
be awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or
the small pipe of the robin in the hedge. For
you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten road;
the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked.
Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes
along the lane; inn after inn proffer you their cups
of raw wine; river by river receive your body in the
sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and
high trees and pleasant villages should compass you
about; and light fellowships should take you by the
arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way.
You may see from afar off what it will come to in
the end ­the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all
near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and
an outcast. And yet it will seem well ­and
yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem the
best ­to break all the network bound about
your feet by birth and old companionship and loyal
love, and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and
fro, in town and country, until the hour of the great
dissolvent.

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the
cover. For the forest is by itself, and forest
life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land
of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that
they cannot take the world as it is given to them
by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they
see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place. If the sea, for
instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts
will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their
dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change.
And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness
is for much in the effect produced. You reckon
up the miles that lie between you and intrusion.
You may walk before you all day long, and not fear
to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out
of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers.
And there is an old tale enhances for the imagination
the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures you
in the thought of your seclusion. When Charles
VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis,
there was captured an old stag, having a collar of
bronze about his neck, and these words engraved on
the collar: “CÃ¦sar mini hoc donavit.”
It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved at
this occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves
thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and following
an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for
you, it is scarcely in an idle curiosity that you
ponder how many centuries this stag had carried its
free antlers through the wood, and how many summers
and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge.
If the extent of solemn wood could thus safeguard
a tall stag from the hunter’s hounds and horses,
might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves,
with all the pangs and trépidations of man’s
life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more
than the span of human years? Here, also, crash
his arrows; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the
gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt
this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin
and small: and if you were but alert and wary,
if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too
might live on into later generations and astonish
men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial
success.

For the forest takes away from you
all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin
or thwart your free desires. Here all the impudences
of the brawling world reach you no more. You
may count your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes
of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression of the
lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit
through the naked heavens. Here shall you see
no enemies but winter and rough weather. And
if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of
healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all
the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that
is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight
of these woods, fall away from you like a garment.
And if perchance you come forth upon an eminence,
where the wind blows upon you large and fresh, and
the pines knock their long stems together, like an
ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the
plain a factory chimney defined against the pale horizon ­it
is for you, as for the staid and simple peasant when,
with his plough, he upturns old arms and harness from
the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there
was a battle there in the old times; and, sure enough,
there is a world out yonder where men strive together
with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.
So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination.
A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend
as of some dead religion.

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